Give me something to assemble, I won’t look at the directions, I’ll try to figure it out by myself. It’s why I love Ikea furniture.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

When a team takes ownership of its problems, the problem gets solved. It is true on the battlefield, it is true in business, and it is true in life.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

And so I think that the idea of America working with other countries to solve problems is good for us, and it is part of digging us out of the ‚my way or the highway‘ approach that was evident in the previous eight years.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

I like making things. I don’t like getting my picture taken.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

Marrying an old bachelor is like buying second-hand furniture.

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Never say no when a client asks for something, even if it is the moon. You can always try, and anyhow there is plenty of time afterwards to explain that it was not possible.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Our real problem, then, is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

If two smart, intelligent, clever guys sit together on a table, and you both want the same, where can be the problem? We all want to be successful.

There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

When you begin to worry, go find something to do. Get busy being a blessing to someone; do something fruitful. Talking about your problem or sitting alone, thinking about it, does no good; it serves only to make you miserable. Above all else, remember that worrying is totally useless. Worrying will not solve your problem.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

I try to do something the audience might not have seen before. Like if I’m gonna kiss a girl I wanna kiss her like a girl has never been kissed. Like maybe I would kick her legs out from under her and catch her right before she hits the ground and then kiss her.

It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.

As long as you blame someone or something else – something outside you that’s bigger than you are – as the source of your problems, the problems won’t get solved.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

If I’ve got a problem with one of my clients that needs to get solved, guess what I’m going to do? I’m going to call them up, and I’m going to say, ‚Hey, here’s what’s going on. This is the situation. This thing went sideways. I didn’t expect it. Now it’s going to take me some more time to get you what you need.‘ But I’m going to do that upfront.

I’m saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

One of my direct subordinates, one of my guys that worked for me, he would call me up or pull me aside with some major problem, some issue that was going on. And he’d say, ‚Boss, we’ve got this, and that, and the other thing.‘ And I’d look at him and I’d say, ‚Good.‘

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life. My way of dealing with frustration is to shut down and to think and speak logically.

You’d be waiting 30 or 40 years for me to build a table. I have more than two left hands.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

I used to worry about every little thing, trying to figure out every problem. Well, I realize now how foolish that was. I was no more in control of my life than the man on the moon.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

I ran into Isosceles. He had a great idea for a new triangle!

My earliest books focus almost entirely on psychological tools to help readers employ effective commonsense approaches to problems. There are no references to God or a higher self in the first 15 or so years of my publishing history.

This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.

The question is not, ‚Do you have a problem?‘ The question is, ‚Does the problem have you?‘

When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.

I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.